A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own.
Carl Jung
I remember when Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1968. I remember that nauseous feeling I had in the pit of my stomach. I was a sophomore in college. My high school friends were getting killed in Vietnam. I marched in demonstrations against the war. My parents didn’t march although they did not support the war in 1968.
Today, every day, 10,000 baby boomers turn 60 in this country. Many of them have marched, organized and protested through the past 50 years. Ten thousand people every day, who, at the very least, share the experience of protest — they joined in or they watched or both. Today, whether they agree with demonstrators or not, the “older generation” can understand the language of protest.
One way this “older generation” can be positive role models today is to let our feelings, thoughts and actions flow from our conscious elderhood — from the afternoon of our lives.
Humans are hard-wired to live passionate lives of purpose, meaning and service to the greater good. This is true throughout our lives, but it comes into sharper focus as we age consciously. Aging and death are inevitable. How we age and die is a choice, and, as Ron Pevny writes, “Our choices have consequences for ourselves and for our descendants, who will look back upon us as their ancestors and wonder what we did to help assure a healthy world for them.”
Longevity does not automatically lead to wisdom. As a conscious elder, one can be a repository of the balanced wisdom so needed in today’s complex and threatened world. We can be positive role models.
Two things to help us onto that path:
• break the chains of ageism (both external and internal) – reject today’s prejudiced, stereotypical images of “old people” as unproductive, sexless, senile, poor, sick, inflexible, weak, bad.
• begin, or continue, the ongoing “inner work” of conscious aging – think about, talk about and act about becoming more like the person we really want to be.
Change is inevitable. How we deal with change is a choice. Mechanically inserting what we felt, thought and did in our 20s into the older containers that we are today ignores the qualitative differences of our elderhood. We are explorers and pioneers, at the forefront of changes about which we don’t yet know very much. We do know that we have opportunities to positively influence not just our unfolding last third of life but also the lives of those around us and yet to come.
If we do the honest work of conscious aging, even when we cannot physically stand up anymore, we will still stand for what is right.
Marc Blesoff is a former Oak Park village trustee, co-founder of the Windmills softball organization, co-creator of Sunday Night Dinner, a retired criminal defense attorney, and a novice beekeeper. He currently facilitates Conscious Aging Workshops and Wise Aging Workshops in the Chicagoland area.